Philip Leacock (1956)
Based on a novel by A J Cronin (with a screenplay by John Bryan and Lesley Storm), this British drama is limited yet the narrowness of its focus gives it a peculiar intensity. Consular official Harrington Brande is personally and professionally embittered. His wife left him and his diplomatic career has stalled – because, we’re led to believe, he’s such a prickly, chilly character. Passed over for a senior appointment at the British embassy in Madrid, Brande is posted to San Jorge, Catalonia, accompanied by his young son Nicholas. He’s pathologically possessive of the boy, insisting that Nicholas is physically delicate, refusing to let him go to school or have any contact with other children, or with his estranged mother back in Scotland. The heart of the story is the growth of the lonely, sequestered child’s friendship with Jose, the young gardener at the Brande residence, and of the father’s terrible jealousy of the relationship. The (melo)dramatic climax is precipitated by Garcia, Brande’s wily, boozing chauffeur-valet, who frames Jose for stealing Nicholas’s watch. There are some striking long shots of single figures dwarfed by the empty, bleached landscapes in which they stand but Philip Leacock’s direction is mostly unimaginative and the film is structured as a series of reminders to Harrington Brande that he’s a cold fish or a stuffed shirt or is doing untold damage to his son. Nicholas, Jose, the sympathetic family doctor, his boss at the embassy all have at least one go at him – Brande won’t or can’t budge until the closing stages (and once the father has experienced the necessary personality change the ending seems perfunctory). Yet this structure – and the playing of the father and son – lends The Spanish Gardener an emotional insistence, even relentlessness.
In the superficially thankless role of the control freak father, Michael Hordern seems a shade overemphatic at first but his finely empathetic performance is eventually impressive. You’re left in no doubt either that Brande loves his son deeply or that his desperately forbidding personality makes it impossible for him to seem anything other than a desiccated ogre to most people and baffling and hurtful to the boy. As Nicholas, the eleven-year-old Jon Whiteley is often touching – an effect increased by the discrepancy between his slightly wooden line readings and his gut connection with the part. Whiteley’s heavy, sad movement is very expressive. Dirk Bogarde, still with one of the ‘Doctor’ films ahead of him when he made this one, is physically convincing as Jose in hair and eye colouring and, more important, in allowing us to see the idealised figure the gardener is in the mind of Nicholas. Bogarde doesn’t, though, have a labourer’s physique. He comes across more as aesthete than athlete even in the sequence when the Brandes go to watch a pelota game where Jose is the star turn. In other respects, Bogarde seems completely miscast. It’s not just the cultured voice – although it’s striking how limiting that RP accent is (Cyril Cusack retains his Irish accent as Garcia but you can still accept him as Spanish in a way you can’t Bogarde). It’s also that Bogarde, in trying (honourably) not to be condescending and to make the gardener emotionally sensitive, suggests an intellectual sophistication – surely the actor’s own – that’s quite wrong for the character.
Cyril Cusack’s Garcia is entertainingly, expressionistically seedy and sometimes frightening. As usual, Cusack is outstanding among the supporting players but there are other good people on hand too – Bernard Lee as Brande’s boss, Geoffrey Keen as the doctor, Rosalie Crutchley as a housekeeper. Lyndon Brook has a persuasive callowness as a junior consular official. It’s unsurprising that Josephine Griffin, as his wife, and Maureen Swanson, as Jose’s girlfriend, were barely heard of again. The same goes for Jon Whiteley – but that, according to Wikipedia, was because his mother insisted on his doing his eleven plus rather than making more films: Whiteley went on to become an art historian at the Ashmolean.
There are some very clumsy bits in the story. It’s not clear why the father, blinkered as he is, should be blind to the conspicuous moral deficiencies of Garcia; even less clear as to how Jose and Nicholas communicate in writing when Brande has forbidden them to talk to each other. (The notes that pass between them are in English – presumably because it wouldn’t have done in a mid-1950s British film to have them written in Spanish and subtitled? The father may be outrageously biased against Jose in calling him an ‘illiterate oaf’ but, even with Dirk Bogarde’s presence confusing the issue, it’s hard to believe this young Spanish labourer would have written English.) The cinematographer was Christopher Challis. The overwrought score is by John Veale.
11 September 2010
